Confluence Content Manager
The Challenge
A big part of managing a confluence space (or any type of knowledge base) is keeping an eye on how fresh information is. Over time content builds up - which is great since you may need it in the future… unfortunately it’s also a challenge as much of that content may not be immediately useful as time goes on. Old versions of policies, information related to completed projects and even old product updates all fall into this category. They’re all very useful when they’re first created and shared, and then lose their usefulness as time goes on.
It can be challenging to figure out what content falls into that category. The best way I’ve discovered is to open up the page analytics for any given page and see when it was last viewed. This, however, doesn’t work on a bigger scale as you have to repeat it for every page you want to examine. Another method I’d used is to just look at my content every 6 months and archive anything older than a year old and then hope no one needed it. This is dangerous as I’m likely to archive something that folks actually use or need (not the end of the world, but annoying to fix and disruptive to work).
The Solution
A recent feature update called Content Manager (for premium and enterprise customers), however, is making managing content a lot easier. It provides a single place to go to to see everything in the space, including when it was last viewed and how many times it’s been accessed in the past year. This alone makes it valuable as you can see everything in a space all at once (instead of going through page by page). Even better, you can perform bulk archiving or deleting on as many pages as you like, giving you the ability to update entire sections of your space at the same time.
I’ve been having a lot of success using this on a regular basis (currently monthly) to see what content is actually being used, and then taking action to update, or archive, older things. This process used to take a very long time since I had to look at individual pages, so having something like the content manager is a huge time saver.
Where to find it
The content manager is available to premium and enterprise customers and shows up both under space settings and in the sidebar.
What can you do with it
The content manager shows you your space’s structure, including all parent/child relationships. Any content, including whiteboards and databases appear in it, giving you a complete picture of what’s in the space.
You can select multiple pieces of content by checking the box next to them, or use the more actions menu to action on a specific piece of content. Selecting a parent will select all of it’s children making it very easy to act on entire branches at a time.
Most importantly it shows you when it was last updated, last viewed and total views over a year. This makes it incredibly easy to identify content that is stale, and either a good candidate for being updated.
There are also two filters currently available to speed you up even more:
Inactive pages - any page that hasn’t been visited, commented on or updated (you can select the time period). This makes it incredibly easy to find stale content and take action.
Pages without active owners - Any page where the page owner’s account is inactive (e.g. left the organization). Since the page owner is typically who folks go to asking for updates or with questions, being able to easily get a list of all the pages missing active owners is a great tool.
